Either Crassus had been passing information by hand signal back to the command group, or else Varg had had his fill of waiting. Drums sounded, and the Legion came into sight. Varg had placed Tavi’s leading cohorts in the center and flanked them with the taurg cavalry, while a fresh group of warriors stood ready to support any weak points in the line.

“Sir?” Crassus shouted toward him, gesturing at what lightning remained. “What do we do with the rest of it?”

Tavi pointed a finger at the collapsed section of wall, where the vord were pouring out.

Crassus nodded and over the next several minutes dumped all the energy they’d captured from the morning’s thunderstorm into the relatively narrow opening. Lightning bolts blew craters in the earth and left the smoldering wreckage of vord forms lying on the blasted ground.

The Legion closed in, with taurga simply crushing down vord that had spread out to the sides of the opening. Their riders never needed to lift their weapons. The Battlecrows and the Prime plugged the hole in the wall and began methodically slaughtering the vord. They were aided by a thin line of Varg’s warriors armed with balests, the heavy, steel-bowed, shoulder-fired weapons of the Canim. The warriors’ height allowed them to shoot over the Aleran lines without striking an allied legionare, and when one of the steel projectiles struck a vord, the creature fell, screaming, or simply expired outright.

The mantis-form vord were dangerous opponents: So were the most experienced and decorated cohorts in the First Aleran. Tavi watched as their centurions assessed the threat of the mantis-form scythes. The weapons really weren’t terribly different from the long-handled sickle-swords used by the Canim militia during the last battles against Nasaug’s forces in the Vale, but if adjustments weren’t made, they could take a toll on the cohorts.

Centurions all along the line came to similar conclusions at almost the same moment. At their roaring orders, the first rank dropped to fight in a low, defensive crouch while the second shifted to their spears, their shields held high and tilted up, to deflect or reduce the effect of any downward-plunging scythes toward themselves or their fighting partners in the first rank. The spearmen made long thrusts over the front rank’s shoulders and helmets to discourage the vord from pressing in too close, and any vord that seemed to gain an advantage was swiftly introduced to a heavy steel balest bolt.

Tavi watched the leading cohorts take light casualties. “Light” casualties, he thought. Only someone who has never cleaned the lifeblood from a fallen legionare’s armor thinks that “light” casualties are insignificant.

Men died, fighting at his command far below. But, he thought to himself, not nearly as many of them as if they had walked into the deadly hailstorm of arrow-wasps.